How To Surf The Web Anonymously With Tor and Vidalia

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In one of my previous post  How to surf the web anonymously with proxies i explained the use and  Importance  of a proxy ?, why you need to stay anonymous ? ..etc .In this post i will explain How you can use Tor and Vidalia to surf the web anonymously



What is Tor ?
 Tor-proxy is a free proxy-server service that Internet users can use to hide their IP address while surfing the Web. An IP address is a number used to identify computers on the Internet, and for reasons of safety and security, it may sometimes be desirable to hide the address.


What is Vidalia ?
Vidalia is a GUI (graphical user interface) implementation for Tor,  It allows the user to start, stop, and view the status of Tor; monitor bandwidth usage; view, filter, and search log messages; and configure some aspects of Tor


Difference Between An Anonymous Proxy And Tor-proxy
Well you will be wondering and saying what is the need of  Tor-proxy when we are able to do the same thing using an Anonymous proxy ?. To clear your doubts lets see how an Anonymous proxy and Tor works

Working of an Anonymous proxy

In the above example we are connecting  to the web server through a proxy server .So a proxy server hides our identity by acting as an intermediary between us and the web server that we are accessing . But what if owner of proxy server starts reviling our identity.So we are not sure on what proxy-server to relay on to stay anonymous


Working of  Tor-proxy
Tor actually works on a deeper level dealing with a computer’s SOCKETS directly.I will
not be going to deep into it as most readers will find it very difficult to understand the
explanation .In simple words Tor network uses a distributed network of nodes – of other
Tor users – to re-route all the packets from your network.What this means is – no single link can identify the source and the destination

In the above example the client passes through three different servers or nodes before reaching the actual web server. The path taken by the client is denoted by green arrows

• Node 1 Knows the actual origin(client) but not the actual destination (web server)
• Node 5 Neither knows the actual origin nor the actual destination.
• Node 9 Knows the actual destination but not the actual origin.

Thus no one exactly knows which client is accessing which web server. So it is highly anonymous.


Using Tor And Vidalia To Surf The Web Anonymously
1. First download and Install Tor-bundle which includes Tor and vidalia from Here ,to  get the password click Here

2. Open Tor-bundle and check all components as shown , follow the on screen instructions to finish instillation process

3. Now Open  Vidalia Control Panel from  task bar and Click on Start Tor

4. Now open Mozilla Firefox browser,and  click on red highlighted Tor Disabled ON which is at the right hand corner of  the browser , now it will turn green and say Tor Enabled.

To check weather your  behind  a proxy go to www.whatismyip.com you can see a different ip address after setting up Tor

Disadvantages of Tor 

Since it passes through multiple Tor nodes, the Internet connection  can  be slow. Even with all this, Tor is not very safe. There are potential pitfalls and security threats. Tor by itself does not encrypt the payload , at the exit node .So a sniffer at the exit node can gather all the information. as show

.

So Unless the application encrypts data using  (SSL), we can gather all the information form the exit node using a sniffer 

Hope you like this post .If you have any doubts please feel free to post a comment 

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